Conceptual Schemes and Conventionalism

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter critically examines issues relevant to the construction and reality of social categories, focusing on issues concerning conceptual schemes and conventionalism. Section 16.1 provides an introduction. Section 16.2 examines the general idea of conceptual schemes, focusing on Kuhn’s influential theory of paradigms. While Kuhn’s position implies a conceptual relativity and antirealism (or instrumentalism) about scientific concepts, Davidson and Popper challenge the Kuhnian orthodoxy that the presence of conceptual schemes implies conceptual relativity or incommensurability of competing conceptual schemes. A key difference between scientific and social conceptual schemes is that the former are oriented towards describing nature, whereas the latter are oriented towards social utility or usefulness. Section 16.3 examines some foundational works in social ontology, focusing on the accounts of Lewis, Gilbert, and Searle, that hold that social categories are grounded by a conventionalist conceptual scheme. These accounts of social categories imply that the reality of social categories is constituted by, or grounded in, social conventions, which ultimately reflect, or are anchored by, explicit or implicit community-level agreements. Section 16.4 surveys some prominent accounts of social human categories, focusing on the views of Hacking, Khalidi, Mallon, Haslanger, and Ásta. A common tendency in these accounts is the portrayal of social categories as social to the extent that they are conventionally determined. This suggests that the proper contrast class for social categories is natural categories, as opposed to individual categories or innate categories.</jats:p>